Thursday, November 6, 2008

Naturally a couple days after I compile the big-ass list for bears, they announce the change to how gearing works for bears. Expect them to make huge changes to cats - possibly requiring cats to all use spellpower or something - shortly after you read this. The phrase "barring some last-minute surprises" is especially amusing.

At least cats shouldn't be so surprising, right? RIGHT? Sure.

While I'd like to do a list of gear with and without hit/expertise rating and how they're valued, the truth is that at level 80, pre-naxx you're likely not going to be at either cap, and the differences between the gear pieces are fairly minor. I've put the overall gear ranking in to allow you to judge how much better something is than something else, but keep in mind that the gear values for you, specifically, are going to vary as you get closer to the hit/expertise cap. For dealing with this most optimally I recommend using Rawr when it gets done with a cat model for Wrath.

The hit cap is 296 at level 80. The Expertise cap is 214 rating without primal precision, 148 with it.

The same rules for gear for bears apply to cats too:

If it costs arena points, list only the best of the arena points

If it costs honor, list only the best of the honor

List the best heroic drop

List the best non-heroic drop

List the best craftable

List the best quest reward

List the best BoE

List the best and often second-best item from BC

I've listed pre-Wrath items in Italics.

The basic rankings for values are centered around agility, and take heavily from Toskk's research on the druid wiki and Nightcrowler's values on EJ:

- yeah, I know. No ranking values and even gear that you can only get from Naxx. There just really isn't that much to get here. Idol of the Wastes is likely fairly good though I've not tested the proc rate. Same goes for the Idol of Resolves. The real big winner is the Idol of Worship, which thanks to the smaller frequency of shreds, the buffing of armor on bosses and the improvement of rip time should be the winner.

-you'll definitely be upgrading your rings soon; armor penetration really isn't all that strong, and there are a lot of great rings out there. The Surge Needle ring is not only the best you can get pre-Naxx, it's the best you can get post-Naxx; I'd be shocked to see it on the AH. But maybe you'll be lucky. Otherwise, start saving that 8k gold...

-the Violet Hold neck is pretty sweet, but it takes a lot of luck to get the right boss. The emblem of heroism neck is the biggest upgrade from non-badge gear to badge gear you can get for a cat, so it should be a high priority to spend if you're so inclined.Trinket:

- This is, honestly, the hardest one for me to evaluate; without ideas on what the proc rates, internal cooldowns and values are, it's hard for me to stack-rank these. That being said, I think the Darkmoon Card: Greatness is going to turn out to be exceptionally strong for a class that likes strength and agility so much, and keep in mind you can get a +90 strength version of the trinket as well, and the uptime of it seems to be about 33% - meaning you'd have about +190 of a stat over time. That's pretty incredible. Mirror of Truth is a great crit/AP trinket similar to BC trinkets, and should scale well. Meteorite Whetstone appears to be another DST-like ability. Sphere of Red dragon's blood is just amazing for the hit rating, but otherwise meh. Vestige of Haldor could be really, really fun if it procs on per hit instead of per swing. More testing is required. :)

- Because of the gem slots, the Carapace of Sun and Shadow gets very good. Same with the PvP gear. Midnight Chestguard and Nether Shadow Tunic are both quite strong too. I would recommend against buying the badge chest until you've gotten everything else; the expense is very high.

- The high hit on the Gilt-Edged Gauntlets are what puts them over the top (and make them arguably better than the Naxx-10 gear). The Handwraps of Preserved History are already the best pre-Naxx piece for bears; they'll do really well for cats too. The badge hands are not that strong either. Save the badges for bigger upgrades.

- while the best is the engineering helm (and it's better than Naxx-10) I can't recommend engineering; the item is just too easily replacable and the overall benefits aren't there compared to the other professions. I really, truly want to find where Mask of the Watcher drops.

-The Gored Hide Legguards are going to be this expansion's version of Midnight Legguards. I put in a second rep reward because I want every druid out there to be wearing strappy pants. STRAPPY PANTS. There really aren't any good quest rewards compared to this stuff.

-As usual, the shoulders are the most ostentatious and the least actually useful piece of gear you can get. The difference between T6 and wrath is very small. This time there's a treat though - the best pre-Naxx shoulders you can get are crafted and BoE, and shouldn't be too insane to make.Waist:

- The Trollwoven Girdle is almost the best in slot here, but is beaten out by the gem power in the Sharp-Barbed piece. The only other surprise is how good the BC gear is. If you're still wanting to keep a 2pT6 bonus this is not a bad candidate, though the boots and (surprisingly) the shoulders might be better. The emblem of heroism belt is a clear #1 as well, though I'd get the neck before getting this.

-I wouldn't grind to get exalted for the dragonfriend bracers either, though that's a lot of nice crit and are really good if you're hit-capped already. I was pretty surprised at how poor the T6 bracers are here. The Drake-Champion's Bracers are a great BoE surprise; see if you can find 'em on the AH or get lucky running Oculus.

Thanks for this great list! I went through my gear and noticed I have far fewer cat items that will last me to 80 than bear items. I have 12 slots of gear on your list for bears, only 4 for cats. And if anything I've put more effort into my cat gear than my bear gear.

Is that how it looks to you too, that we'll be upgrading our cat gear faster than our bear gear? If so, why do you think that is? -- Flyv.

Felkan - Thanks! And yeah, I'd like to go back and do the bear points too; having a pure ranking is really nice, but having a relative ranking also helps with figuring out which items are must-haves and which items you can downgrade slightly on.

Phil - yeah, me too. And the best part of it is so far is that they're BoE. The only concern is that no one actually knows where the trollwoven patterns drop, though they appear to be some kind of vendor purchase - and not a rep one.

Flyv - thanks :) I've noticed that too, that a lot of the gear simply isn't that good for dps. I think part of it is that AP and strength became better stats than agility, and before we focused almost entirely on agility. Crit also became a lot better, and armor pen became much worse. That meant a lot of the better traditional rogue gear becomes better for cats - but that wasn't what we were looking for before, so we don't have it.

As an example, the midnight chestguard from Archimonde wasn't nearly as good as the Nether Shadow Tunic because of the lack of agility on the former. Now? It's better.

Bears, by comparison, didn't change nearly so much in terms of the stats they wanted, so that gear tends to hold up better.

Great list thank you. I havent been in beta, so its nice to get a flavor of the kind of gear out there. It all looks pretty sweet. Also nice to learn that our stat priorities are changing to be more in line with rogues. Makes sense since its all rogue gear we'll be taking. Let it no longer be known as rogue gear!

I had actually _just_ updated the Mask of the Watcher last night for where it dropped (along with the other bits I had originally missed). Thanks for catching that. :)

And yeah, I want to go through the badge rewards as well. I hesitated for this before simply because most people I knew were going to ignore them completely for gearing up; it was going to take too long to get the x badges before moving on to Naxx. Still, should put them up for completeness sake and whatnot. Possibly in another post, since this one is so big already.

=D I guess I should look things over before I say anything, haha. I just remembered a comment about it and figured I would come back and say something. And I added the mention of the neck because the idol was up there too.

Dan - thanks for coming by. And really good question! I don't specifically value any of the set bonuses in here, though I should probably comment on them. The 4pT6 is a really good bonus, especially given how good rip is with the glyph and with a 2pT7 bonus.

The biggest problem with 4pT6 is that, simply, the tier 6 pieces (especially the pre-sunwell ones) are so poor for cat. They waste a lot of item budget on things like stamina and int.

If you are going to keep 4pT6, I would recommend keeping belt, boots, bracers and shoulders. Those are the least valuable upgrades on a per-slot basis, and they should be vaguely competitive if you gem them. The chest, legs, gloves and (especially) head are just too good by comparison. And that all said, I've not run the numbers yet to see whether 15% more rip damage is really worth losing all those stats. My suspicion is that it'll be acceptable, but it won't be optimal.

Now, by comparison using 2pT6 is pretty close to optimal pre-naxx, as manglespam with the lower crit rate that you'll have is going to be more effective at keeping up bleeds and doing more damage with ferocious bite. That changes when you start getting more gear, but until then it's pretty close.

With the wotlk changes to cats I've been using rake and ferocious bite a lot more. That being said I finally started understanding and using savage roar after having it for roughly two levels. It has replaced FB as my primary CP sink. It was something I saw on RAWR that got my attention and changed my perspective. Before I was fixated on getting to 5CP before using a finishing move (FB/RIP). An old and difficult habit to break from the pre 3.0 kitty dps rotation. On RAWR it indicated an optimum SR rotation of mangle-rake-SR. I tried it and loved my immediately improved dps. Even on trash mobs while quest grinding. Even better, for those mobs that have a few more hps savage roar is still up for my second set of combo points. I've seen FBs of 8k plus.

This brings me to my question. With the new mechanics of savage roar and its percentage boost to AP, does it make more sense now to stack AP more?

It looks like the badge items you're recommending are solely the 25 man versions. Any chance you could put in the 10 man versions ranked also, separately? I doubt I'm the only person who is not going to try to venture into 25 mans.

Thanks a lot for the great list, by the way. Using your two feral lists to figure out my gear path.

Hey, Beable - thanks for coming by. I had recently did a post for the 10-man badge pieces, and posted that separately for cats along with the rank (as well as putting it here). There simply aren't that many 10-man pieces that exist. But they're here.

With the new mechanics of savage roar and its percentage boost to AP, does it make more sense now to stack AP more?

Anon, the system already ranks AP fairly high. It's just that strength is higher (because it gives 2.166 AP per str point thanks to scaling) and hit/expertise are higher yet (because the cost of a miss is very high in the cycle). AP scales MUCH better than it did before, but it still doesn't beat strength or agility.

hi. thanks so much for the feral gear lists. i wonder if the 25 EoH ring (Ring of Invincibility) might make it onto the ring list above the 8K ring? it's stats are slightly better and you don't need all that gold, just heroics. It's also available from Harold Winston.

Ok, I'm confused. I was hitting 268 for hit and expecting to use a food buff to hit the cap. Now I recently read Karthis' article over at http://www.resto4life.com/2009/01/09/guest-post-so-you-want-to-rip-some-face/comment-page-1/#comment-8511 who i think is an amazing theorycrafter. He lists the cap at 263

Hit rating of 296 (which is what I listed) is what is needed to overcome 9% chance to miss, which was what was thought to be the overall miss rate. It appears from some testing that this may be incorrect; the resources I've ready say 8%. If that's the case, you should only need 263 hit rating. I'm not sure where he gets the 8.2% hit rating requirement, to be honest; I've not seen anything like that anywhere.

The tricky thing is that it appears there is a different hit rating against the boss-level target dummies and some mobs.

Along with retesting Living Root of the Wildheart, I'm going to test this out a bit as I can. I'll let you know and hopefully write an article. It looks like I need to update the cat lists and guides a bit. :)

An interesting side note I just realized from reading another post on hit cap on the forums is if you have even one Draenei in your party you get 1% more chance to hit. Not sure what the math is on that (thats why i need you guys, i suck at math).

With patch 3.0.8, what do you have to say about the Titansteel Destroyer? That's a lot of hit for those of us kittens that are not hit capped. Is the lack of agi and crit on the weapon too detrimental to our dps, or would a good enchant fix that up? Thanks!

Leviyah, thanks for coming by. I posted to a certain extent what it would rank in this post, but I need to clean it up. Basically, this is the best pre-naxx weapon you can get if you're not hit-capped. If you are, the Staff of Trickery is better. It does beat out the Staff of the Plague beast for that reason too, but Black Ice, Inevitable Defeat, and the other feral DPS staves beat it.

ThinkTank bio

About Me

Kalon likes playing tanks, no matter how hard he tries to fight it. He is not as hardcore as many but spends a lot of time thinking about WoW, and randomly rants about it now and then. He played formerly on the Argent Dawn (EU) server and was a founding member of Fire and Blood (Quel'Dorei) before joining Casually Serious, a guild devoted to hard core progression on only 8 hours of raiding time a week.
He is a devoted husband, father, and when he has the time programs software.